Colin Martindale of the University of Maine studied fifty-two contemporary poets, discovering that nearly 50 percent had some psychological problem and 15 percent could be defined as sociopaths. For example, Percy Shelly had frequent hallucinations of a man attacking him with a revolver, and John Keats was susceptible to inexplicable fits of weeping and hysterical laughter.

Construction worker Travis Bogumill survived having a three-and-a-half-inch-long nail driven into his skull in July of 1998. The gun drove the nail so deeply into Bogumill's brain that no piece of the nail was visible. Despite the horrific nature of his injury, the only adverse effect was a decreased ability to perform simple mathematics.

Before morticians began refrigerating bodies, they would poke holes in corpses bloated with excess gases and set a candle to them. The gases would ignite and produce a blue flame that could last for days.

The salt flats in California's Death Valley are home to wondering stones. Rocks ranging in size from small pebbles to half-ton boulders appear to move across the wasteland, sometimes as far as 860 feet in one year. No one has witnessed one moving, and scientists are baffled as to what causes the phenomenon.

An area of the University of Tennessee is sectioned off by the Anthropological Research Facility to study the decomposition of bodies, and is referred to as the "body farm." Unlike cadavers used for medical research, the bodies of the deceased are not returned to families.

The record of most weight held from one's nipples belongs to the Great Nippulini, a circus performer specializing in lifting heavy objects attached to his two nipple piercings. He successfully suspended forty-eight pounds of weight from his nipple in 2003, and beat his own record with a fifty-five pound anvil the following year.

The iron maiden was a torture device shaped like a vertical sarcophagus with spikes lining the interior. The torturer would close the doors, forcing he spikes into the victim's body. The spikes were arranged in such a way so that they would miss vital organs and the victim would bleed to death.